The present invention generally relates to sericin extraction and coating sericin on an object. More specifically, the present invention relates to separating and extracting sericin from silk by utilizing a novel method and a process. Furthermore, the present invention also relates to extracting and creating a sericin solution with a high molecular weight. In addition, the present invention also relates to coating a glove with the sericin solution.
Sericin is a protein created by Bombyx mori, or silkworms, which produce silk. The silk produced by the silkworms include fibroin, which is structurally located in the center of the silk, and sericin, which surrounds the fibroin as gummy substances. For thousands of years, humans have utilized sericin from silk for cosmetic and skin treatment purposes, as many people since the antiquities believed that silk sericin exhibits anti-aging, moisturizing, and protective effects on human skin and hair.
Modern scientific studies also have confirmed numerous dermatological benefits of applying sericin on a skin layer. Sericin's chemical composition is found to include many amino acids, which closely resemble natural moisturizing factor (NMF) in human eccrine sweat. When coated on top of a skin layer, sericin has shown superior moisture retention and substantially less skin irritation, compared to conventional oil-based and water-based moisturizing lotions. Furthermore, in some studies, skin layers that were coated with sericin have also exhibited substantially better ultraviolet (UV) ray blocking, anti-aging, anti-microbial, and wound-healing tendencies, compared to the control groups of skin layers that did not have sericin coats.
Typically, silk threads, which are mostly made of fibroin in the natural bulk silk material, garner substantially more premium over sericin in the commodities market. Therefore, the conventional method of sericin extraction has been fundamentally optimized for efficient and effective extraction and processing of the silk threads, rather than the extraction of sericin. From silk processing perspective, sericin has been often viewed merely as a secondarily-lucrative byproduct from the silk thread extraction and processing operation.
Unfortunately, the conventional method of sericin extraction from a natural bulk silk material involves heating up the natural bulk silk material in order to extract and separate the silk threads from sericin. In a conventional high-temperature separation and extraction process, the extracted sericin solution exhibits a low molecular weight due to evaporation of moisture and particles. Scientific studies have shown that low-molecular-weight sericin tend to seep into the skin too soon and too easily, instead of forming a protective moisturizing barrier on top of the human skin as a close simulant to natural moisturizing factor (NMF) on a stratum corneum (SC) layer of the human skin. Many scientific studies have also shown that NMF's hygroscopic and water-soluble compounds in the SC layer of the human skin provide a natural moisturizing balance to the human skin. Furthermore, some scientists also believe that a skin moisturizing solution that chemically resembles the human skin's natural moisturizing factor (NMF), which forms a protective barrier on top of the human skin, may act as ideal skin humectants.
Because sericin is a close chemical simulant to the NMF, it may be advantageous to devise a novel sericin extraction method that retains a high molecular weight of the sericin from the natural bulk silk material, when the sericin is separated from the natural bulk silk material. Furthermore, it may also be advantageous to coat a glove with the high-molecular-weight sericin produced from the novel sericin extraction method, so that the high-molecular-weight sericin provides a protective natural moisturizing factor (NMF) simulant to a wearer's hand for moisturizing and retaining natural humectants on the wearer's hand. In addition, it may also be advantageous to devise a glove that exhibits anti-microbial, anti-aging, and wound-healing benefits to the wearer's hand, while providing a simulated NMF barrier to the wearer's hand for natural hand moisture retention.